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Their T-Square Is the Jelly Mold

THE WOBBLE THAT WOOS Sam Bompas, left, and Harry Parr of London are seeking to make jelly fashionable again by creating imaginative molds.Credit
Greta Ilieva

SAM BOMPAS and Harry Parr have built painstakingly correct models of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral and Millennium Bridge, and a Madrid airport terminal complete with tiny airplanes.

Unfortunately for anyone curious to see these extravagant works of architecture, they were eaten long ago.

Shimmering, brightly colored gelatin is the chosen medium of Mr. Bompas and Mr. Parr, two young products of Eton and University College, London, who have quickly become England’s leading jelly artists, or as they call themselves, jelly mongers.

Mr. Parr, who was trained as an architect, and Mr. Bompas, who was in public relations, thought it would be cool to open a jelly stand in the Borough Market in London, near where they live.

“All the desserts in the market were very stodgy, and we know from history that jellies were once considered to be the pinnacle of sophistication,” Mr. Parr said. “They were used as very lavish centerpieces, the way marzipan and sugar were used, but then jelly became corrupted by children’s parties.”

The market turned them down, so they took it on themselves to restore jelly’s tarnished reputation.

They began getting private commissions, and about a year ago they went into business on their own as Bompas & Parr. They have made molds for Heston Blumenthal, the chef and owner of the Fat Duck near London, and Gordon Ramsay. A “wedding cake” consisted of tiers of small molds as did a similar party jelly for hospital patients.

They made a multicolored structure for the architect Sir Richard Rogers’s birthday. “That one took us weeks and it was demolished in 15 minutes,” Mr. Parr, 26, said. “We love that.”

Mr. Bompas, 25, said: “We’ll do pretty much anything. We’ve made an entire jellied Christmas dinner, hundreds of layers, each a different course, for television as the ultimate Christmas jelly.”

For Hawksmoor restaurant in London, they created a ziggurat inspired by the steeple of an 18th-century church.

“We were impressed with the quirky, slightly eccentric things they were doing,” said Huw Gott, an owner of the restaurant. “We have a touch of English eccentricity of our own, so we thought it would be a good fit.”

In February, the two came to New York for their first job in the United States, an interpretation of the Marinettian Bombe from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Futurist Cookbook,” the 1932 treatise on food by the Italian Futurist.

The occasion was a dinner at Inside Park at St. Bart’s, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism.” Bompas & Parr were hired by Performa, the performance arts group that organized the event, to make the dessert.

They arrived a few days in advance, suitcases bulging with equipment. “We were very concerned going through airport security with all the strange plastic and metal things we were carrying,” Mr. Bompas said. “But they didn’t stop us in London or New York.”

About an hour before the 100 guests arrived, Mr. Bompas and Mr. Parr started unmolding the jellies, setting them on plates and sequestering them in the restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator. They were focused on their work, tightly wound and impossible to distract.

“This is the first time we’ve done a double mold,” Mr. Bompas said. “The outside is the Campari and the inside, which had to jell after the outside was finished, is orange.”

With Campari and sugar for one of the jellies and orange juice for the other, the result was something like the drink Campari and soda, in jelly form.

They make their own molds, designing them on a computer in the workshops of University College that translates them into three-dimensional models and transfers the specifications to a machine that makes plaster casts of the molds, called plugs. Once the plug is made, thin, malleable high-impact polystyrene plastic is applied to it in a vacuum to form the individual molds.

“At first we thought we’d buy old copper molds,” Mr. Parr said. “But they were too expensive and some of the best ones were owned by collectors. So we started making our own.”

A commission usually starts at about $450 and can take a week or more. Information is available at jellymongers.co.uk.

Although they work in a traditional medium, some of their projects verge on the avant-garde. In collaboration with a chemistry professor at University College, they used food-safe quinine to make jelly that emits a bluish glow under black light. Other experiments are in the works, including growing crystals inside the jelly.